TEDGlobal 2017 Session 1 Speakers

Qudus Onikeku’s dance tribe opens the session with a brief but incredibly energetic production titled “Rainmaker”.

Dr. Augustus Casely-Hayford debunks the nonsense notion that Africa has no history, with an African history lesson that dates back to before the 12th century.

Zachariah Mampilly invites the audience to consider how African political activists, especially the younger generation, engage their governments through protests.

George Steinmetz shows breathtaking pictures of what Africa looks like from the air, an idea he got after he dropped out of Stanford to hitchhike across Africa in what he described as a graduate course in ecological ethnography.

Oshiorenoya Agabi took the audience out of George’s skies and right down to the bleeding edge of neuroscience. While computers are better than humans will ever be at complex mathematical equations, there’s at least a few cognitive functions where humans are much, much better: training a computer to recognize smells would require colossal amounts of computational power and energy.

Touria El Glaoui grew up surrounded by African art and would eventually become a curator. In her talk, she shares a collection of contemporary art that tells powerful stories of African identity and grapples with the complexity of African history.

Nnedi Okorafor asks: “What if an African girl from a traditional family in a part of future Africa is accepted into the finest university in galaxy, planets away? What if she decides to go?”

The answer is in Nnedi’s Binti series, a trilogy that is the perfect gateway drug to Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism looks a lot like science fiction, but Nnedi argues it’s different from sci-fi because its evolutionary roots are different.